[Prompt: Delete?]
[Enter command: Yes]
[Prompt: Please confirm; all data will be lost]
…
…
…
…
…
[Enter command: Abort]
Entry 2
Our parents like to note our birthdays on the Coruscanti calendar. This is the one strange aspect to which they have clung to their past lives.
I say their past lives- my eldest brother was not yet four when we relocated to Nirauan, Chak was barely two, I was not a year of age. A Coruscanti year; a Galactic Standard year. Both of our parents are rooted on Corellia, yet never display an interest towards a Corellian anything. Perhaps they've both seen too much beyond their homeworld, in their own way, to hold to something so quaint.
The story has it that my mother discovered she was pregnant with me the same day she learned that my father defected to Rogue Squadron, to the Rebel Alliance, to the New Republic. It was five months before she saw my father again, before she was reunited with a brother she'd not seen since his childhood. And at six months pregnant, she concealed her condition, just as she concealed the existence of Davin and Chak, lest they be used as pawns in the game of civil war, of galactic strife.
Seven months later, the agents of the Empire proved their worth and caught up with us but not, as it were, for the purposes my father feared. We were turned over to Grand Admiral Thrawn, Syndic Mitth'raw'nuruodo, my father soon followed- and sixteen years later, the Fels are like a myth in the known galaxy: the Imperial ace married to the famous holostar- it's the stuff of fairy tales.
Fairy tales often end tragically.
The tragedy of my parents' story is a fabrication, and it was my father's fear that the illusion was shattered two years ago when outsiders were lured to the fortress which we call home. It has been two years though, and the New Republic has not come crashing down on our heads, my mother's brother has not turned up to demand after her, so perhaps father underestimated the honor of the visitors.
I once asked about them- why were they here, in our isolated alcove of the galaxy? Father's jaw tensed up, his lips tightened into a thin line, and he told me to go look after young Wynssa. It is a reaction I've seen from him before, when a military operation goes poorly, when the objectives are not achieved, or when the costs outweigh the benefits.
I sense that all three were the case in the fiasco of two years ago.
Davin revealed more than father, intimated in me and Jagged, all of twelve at the time, the damage that the fortress had suffered at the hands of the visitors- visitors who, according to my eldest brother, possessed strange and mystical powers, carried blades made of pure energy, destroyed an entire hangar and trapped a whole wing of clawcraft fighters.
Two people. They must have been fearsome warriors, I wonder that father could have underestimated them at all.
Perhaps someone, somewhere, sees them as heroes. Mother's brother is a hero of the Rebellion, and it was Davin who found himself enamored of the tales of fighting against all reasonable odds, of taking down impressive foes, conquering the forces of evil…
Father stopped talking about Wedge Antilles by the time Jagged and I were of a suitable age for such stories; he bade mother to avoid the subject as well. But Davin, inexplicably proud of an uncle he has never known and never will, relayed to us the romantic tales of those glory days, the tragedy of our mother, seeing her husband on one side of the war and her brother on the other.
Jagged is named for his maternal grandfather, it is fitting that he would find himself likewise fascinated. I seem to take more after Chak, who shrugs off such stories of glory and focuses his efforts on excelling at his training, at his piloting and- as ever he has- at pleasing father. I have no training at which to excel, have never sat in the cockpit of a clawcraft fighter, and I rarely please father- but what use have I for heroics?
Heroes are for Davin, who commands an entire wing of fighters, who pits the forces of the Phalanx against the terrible enemies that would threaten the rest of the galaxy, did the Phalanx not throw itself at them with a fury first. Heroes are even for Chak, who pursues his career with the forces of the Hand, rather than the Phalanx.
Jagged and Cherith will soon follow their designated paths, will fulfill their duties. I will stay at home long after they leave which, at fourteen and thirteen, will be sooner rather than later. I will stay home with mother and with Wynssa until she too, in another eight or ten years, pursues the only honorable career known to the chiss: the military. War.
I will stay at home. Because I am a shadow child, and I do not exist.